As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Sunday, 10 January 2016

Grooves in the ground may reveal a bird-like dinosaur mating dance

Did lovestruck dinosaurs do the hustle? (University of Colorado Denver, art by Lida Xing and Yujiang Han)

It's possible that lovestruck dinosaurs did bird-like dances to woo their sweethearts. Paleontologists presented evidence of these groovy moves in a study published Thursday in Scientific Reports. They've found four separate sites in Colorado with long fossilized grooves in the Earth that they believe could have been formed by lusty dinosaurs with fancy feet.

"These are the first sites with evidence of dinosaur mating display rituals ever discovered, and the first physical evidence of courtship behavior," study co-author Martin Lockley of the University of Colorado at Denver said in a statement. "These huge scrape displays fill in a missing gap in our understanding of dinosaur behavior."